Community The Emulation Thread - When That PC Port Just Ain't Happening

Knurek

OG old coot
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Does PCSX2 support automatic save state load/saving? Can't imagine living without it after few years with Retroarch...
 

Kvik

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Downunder.
Does PCSX2 support automatic save state load/saving? Can't imagine living without it after few years with Retroarch...
It does. Last time I used it for SMT Nocturne demon fusing so I can keep the abilities I want since we can't carry over the ones we want like SMT IV.

 

Knurek

OG old coot
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It does. Last time I used it for SMT Nocturne demon fusing so I can keep the abilities I want since we can't carry over the ones we want like SMT IV.

Those aren't automatic, what I meant was what happens in Retroarch, where there's an additional Auto save slot, which always gets saved on emulator exit and loaded back on next start.
(Unless Slot 0 is Auto in PCSX2)
 

Kvik

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Those aren't automatic, what I meant was what happens in Retroarch, where there's an additional Auto save slot, which always gets saved on emulator exit and loaded back on next start.
(Unless Slot 0 is Auto in PCSX2)
Ah, I see. Nothing like that in PCSX2. You would still need to hit the hotkey to load the last state the next time you start (If you hit F1 when slot 0 is selected, F3 will load slot 0 the next time the ROM is loaded).
 

Li Kao

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Where can I get the freshest version of Desmume ? The official site looks to have an super old version, like 2015. There must have been new verisons right ? Or maybe a better NDS emulator ?
 

Kvik

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Where can I get the freshest version of Desmume ? The official site looks to have an super old version, like 2015. There must have been new verisons right ? Or maybe a better NDS emulator ?
You can find the nightly build in the download page, under the Official Nightly Build section.


Alternatively, you can use the RetroArch core instead though.

 
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Li Kao

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Sorry, should have looked a little harder, it wasn't that hidden.
Still, shit homepage :smiling-eyes:

Does the Retroarch core support upscaling ?
 

Kvik

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Downunder.
Sorry, should have looked a little harder, it wasn't that hidden.
Still, shit homepage :smiling-eyes:

Does the Retroarch core support upscaling ?
definitely.



It also depends on the game but the JIT interpreter sometimes will give you better performance than JIT dynarec. DQ IX, for example, performed better with interpreter on my rig.
 

Li Kao

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Sometimes I had to edit the .lpl files manually since it won't detect the game covers. Kind of frustrating for JP PSP titles. :02shout:
Those are words, alright. Words that led me to a google search and a whole tutorial page on Retroarch.
I want the game to appears ! Not sure I want it that bad though :fearful-face:
...lazy4life
 

JMTHEFOX

Planning to Be a Game Designer
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Not sure if this is the right thread to post this but US Sega genesis mini reviews are out recently

Here's one from Rerez

He liked the sound compared to the AtGames Genesis Flashback but the controls are messed up (his unit might be faulty tho), also lack of games,
 

Li Kao

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How hard is to setup Retroarch for DS emulation?
I mean if you can survive Retroarch UI and basic configuration you have made 95% of the work.
If you are not fluent in exhaustive but confusing interface, roll a d20, that's in hours.
 

Knurek

OG old coot
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How hard is to setup Retroarch for DS emulation?
Extremely easy.
Make sure to disable rewind for this core, if you have it enabled elsewhere - I can't reach 100% speed with it enabled on my i7-4790K
 

Gevin

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Sorry, gonna explain better and you'll have to go dumber.

How easy is it for someone that's never used Retroarch before?
 

Knurek

OG old coot
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Sorry, gonna explain better and you'll have to go dumber.

How easy is it for someone that's never used Retroarch before?
Can you use computers and/or ask questions on forums if you can't handle stuff?
If yes, than you should manage.
 

Kvik

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Yeah, the initial setup is pretty easy. The tedious part of it is configuring the playlist and per-game settings just right. :02peek:
 
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Li Kao

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Don't believe their lies, RetroArch is hell. I'm half-convinced there is a translation error and Spartans didn't throw their kids from a cliff but asked them to configure RetroArch.
Thaaaaat being said, we have a super friendly community and that should be a breeze :face-with-stuck-out-tongue-and-winking-eye:


Edit - Speaking of which, why do my DS games keep not getting thumbnails ? They are recognized, I downloaded the thumbnails, but no dice. Is it because they are English patched ? (thumbnails are displayed for other systems)
 
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Kvik

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Downunder.
Don't believe their lies, RetroArch is hell. I'm half-convinced there is a translation error and Spartans didn't throw their kids from a cliff but asked them to configure RetroArch.
Thaaaaat being said, we have a super friendly community and that should be a breeze :face-with-stuck-out-tongue-and-winking-eye:
lol, touché. :02headpat:

The PC interface is getting better though, although I haven't looked into it in a fair while


Edit - Speaking of which, why do my DS games keep not getting thumbnails ? They are recognized, I downloaded the thumbnails, but no dice. Is it because they are English patched ? (thumbnails are displayed for other systems)
Make sure the thumbnail's filename is exactly the same as the game's name in your .lpl file.
 
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Li Kao

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Thanks, I finally could resolve the issue. It was indeed a discrepancy between the names.

Then I got cocky and tried to create a Saturn playlist. Never again :suicide-blob:
As far as I understand Retroarch doesn't support automatically creating playlist on Saturn, but it's no big deal since you can create the .lpl yourself... or so I thought. Even with the clear example here (Playlists and Thumbnails - Libretro Docs), Retroarch never could display something else than the official icon (good) and two false entries reminding me of the content of the lpl. Like it was badly created. Except it's a fucking copy/paste.

Ugu ! :blobweary:
 

Kvik

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Downunder.
Then I got cocky and tried to create a Saturn playlist. Never again :suicide-blob:
As far as I understand Retroarch doesn't support automatically creating playlist on Saturn, but it's no big deal since you can create the .lpl yourself... or so I thought. Even with the clear example here (Playlists and Thumbnails - Libretro Docs), Retroarch never could display something else than the official icon (good) and two false entries reminding me of the content of the lpl. Like it was badly created. Except it's a fucking copy/paste.
Don't forget that in order for the ROM detection to work, the filename of your ROM should match its name in the no-intro database it was based on.


Unless of course, the ROM you have is not listed inside the database.
 
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Li Kao

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It's alive ! Don't really know what I did to make it work better unfortunately.



So if I want to change the label for Policenauts I have to rename the thumbnail file too ? Or am I saying something stupid, which is... uh... probable.
 
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Kvik

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So if I want to change the label for Policenauts I have to rename the thumbnail file too ? Or am I saying something stupid, which is... uh... probable.
You're on the right track. Also, I can suggest to make use of the .m3u playlist for multi-disc title like Policenauts.
 
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Li Kao

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You're on the right track. Also, I can suggest to make use of the .m3u playlist for multi-disc title like Policenauts.
That’s what I did I think, I will have to check. Just used the thumbnail name for this try.
 

MJunioR

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It works, but if you’d rather wait for an official release from the Citra developers (which has apparently been in the works for a long time now) then you can wait for that. If you want to start using it now though, it’s extremely simple to use and navigate. There are a lot more features than that older port allowed as well, including actually useful features such as internal resolution scaling, emulation regions, and more.
Performance seems surprisingly okay for an unofficial first port, might try it out sometime.
 
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Alextended

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I wish retroarch was more user friendly, even configuring controls is a crazy chore, especially if you don't use an Xbox or equivalent controller and you don't know what each input is labelled as what to then scroll through the functions for each button. I had tried to use it in the past, but gave up and reverted to stand alone emulators which to me are more user friendly and work in a more standard windows manner than this PSP-like GUI. But it's used as the base for EmuVR.

So I finally got around to figuring some of it out. Although EmuVR makes it an easier process to get started it also has its quirks so it's a far from an ideal combo.
 
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Tizoc

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What is the status od vita emulation? I wanna try backing up my vita games to play them down the line theu my lappy.
 

Rando10123

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What is the status od vita emulation? I wanna try backing up my vita games to play them down the line theu my lappy.
There's the Vita3k emulator, but progress is slow (very few games are playable, most just do nothing or just ingame) and it'll probably take years or at least more people to contribute to have significant progress.
 
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Theswweet

Theswweet

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What is the status od vita emulation? I wanna try backing up my vita games to play them down the line theu my lappy.
Basically nonexistent. There's some work going on for it, but unfortunately with the back touchpad some games will always be an issue to emulate.
 
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Rando10123

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Yeah, I dunno how developers will figure out to make the Vita's back touchpad usable in an emulator. Very few games support it I think so maybe it's not going to be a huge issue except for maybe 1% or 2% of it's library
 

Alextended

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Just wanted to say, if anyone has a Retro-Bit Official Sega Saturn (or Genesis or whatever) USB Controller and has trouble getting it to work, I think it's because its d-pad is actually faking an analog stick axis and its C and Z buttons are faking the analog trigger axis (whether in dinput or xinput mode but probably to accomodate the latter). Some emulators don't accept input properly from that. It might map properly, but then not work in game and such.

But! SSF Saturn emulator works just fine with it. As does RetroArch that I just started messing around with (thanks to EmuVR's new lightgun support).

I was initially disappointed with that pad due to these issues (I feel build quality is also a bit lesser than the originals) but I've been happy with it since!
 

Kvik

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I've been playing this old classic.



It runs pretty well on the latest PCSX2 nightly. I had to use skipdraw=1 to prevent shadows from rendering. When the shadows are present, there are some ghosting issues around the 3d models.

I used the widescreen hack, 8x IR and ReShade. And additionally a faster runspeed hack.
 

Alextended

Segata's Disciple
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Gungriffon II is so good, I wish such games had been released over here, as well as the Twin Stick peripheral (which a modern dual analog controller makes a pretty decent impression of for emulation). The replay mode is ace as is the support fire action (an air strike!) they swapped the night vision of the first out for.
 

Li Kao

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I have wanted to replay every Gears chronologically for years. Xenia plz :loudly-crying-face:
I mean I could plug my old 360, if I didn't throw it out, but my pad is now drifting like crazy.
 

JMTHEFOX

Planning to Be a Game Designer
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MGS4 is fully playable now. Pretty happy with the progress of RPCS3, hope they continue improving it as fast as possible
RPSC3 devs recently commented it on reddit

Even if the changes were merged into master, meaning they were in the official/main builds of RPCS3. We would not consider it playable. Performance is not there, the game practically requires one of the best CPU's to run at half-decent framerates currently. The article is clickbait and has caused us a lot of grief in our technical support channels with users thinking they can run it on low-end systems. And users with high-end systems complaining that it doesn't run as well as it should for something that should be "playable". All because no system requirements or performance expectations were mentioned in the article or video.


If we had a new build that made MGS4 playable with amazing performance rest assured we would try and get an official video out. We did get BSoD gaming to at least change his video title to say "custom RPCS3 build" so people stopped trying to run it on the main builds as much, but it's still troublesome. That being said there has still been huge improvements but we're not at a level where we would consider the game "playable" yet by our definition. Although it's fair for other users to have a different definition of what makes something "playable" since it's subjective, I really do feel like disclaimers about performance and required hardware should be front and center when telling users an intensive game like this is now running.


Users with an overclocked 8700k still frequently dip below 30fps, and even down to 12fps if you get GPU bottlenecked during the REX chase sequence:
While this was running at 4k. The tester used a 1080ti which is enough for that resolution in most titles on RPCS3. I'd wager a 1060/1070 would also be bottlenecked during this sequence at 1440p. And you can see how that would also be problematic for users with say a gtx 960 trying to run it at 1080p. Regardless though, even during sections that are not bottlenecked by the GPU performance is not there yet even though it has improved. And there are still some crashes from time to time.
TLDR: Game isn't fully playable yet :'(
 

Tizoc

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I am still surprised at how behind PS2 emulation is. I have to use a nightly build of PCSX2 to get yAKUZA 2 to output its visuals better and even THAT has its own issues XP.

I'd say for certain games it runs fine, but it's a shame that some of the more prolific titles might have issues still :blobweary: